Forum Feedback, Suggestions, Complaints, et cetera

[Maj]

Actually i think it was 24 before. No clue when/why that happened and no clue when/why 25 happened either. It's probably google though, kinda like how SRK's SSF4 Guile subform had 500+ people viewing the day that Daigo won a mini-tourney with Guile. Except instead of strategy talk, someone must've said something technical that got people googling some random phrase that led them here.

[Maj]

I made a new welcome thread because the last one sucked.

[Buttermaker]

The [flash] tag would be handy.

Permissions -> Groups' forum permissions -> Registered users -> ... -> Advanced Permissions -> Content -> Can use [flash] BBCode tag

[Maj]

Just to embed u2b videos and such? I guess i'm more or less cool with that. I mean i think videos embedded on forum threads look tacky, but then again i admit i'm clearly biased. (My favorite computer program of all time is Notepad.)

[Buttermaker]

Just to embed u2b videos and such?

Yes.

[Maj]

Should be good to go now. It was under Forum permissions for some reason, and there was kind of a roundabout way of enabling it but i got it.

[Maj]

Has anyone been noticing random downtime recently? I talked to tech support just now and they said:

There is an active server uptime note:
* Kernel upgrade - Rebooting for new kernel. ETA 15 minutes.

It only took like two minutes though. But i told him this happens often and he said:

I know that the admins have been aggressively locating and correcting server performance problems over the past 2 weeks or so. That is what these kernel updates are part of. My current understanding is that while many issues have been corrected, there is still one underlying major issue that still eludes them. Until that problem is located and corrected, there may continue to be brief outages while the admins attempt to locate the problem. We don't expect it to take much longer, but there's no way for us to predict.

Kind of a bullshit answer, but hopefully things improve soon. If not, i'll go complain again in a week or two.

[Buttermaker]

Has anyone been noticing random downtime recently?

Yes.

[Maj]

I updated some stuff, in case anyone's wondering why things look slightly different. The biggest change is minimizing the gap under forum titles caused by the "Mark forums read" link above subforums. The Multimedia Projects forum should look nicer now.

And the "sonichurricane.com / combo video making community" text is gone. Partly because it was screwing up formatting in IE and partly because i always felt it was unnecessary, but didn't know how to remove it.

[Maj]

Great, so now SRK's current version of vBulletin has refback support so anytime we link to an SRK thread and someone clicks on that link, it can show up under the thread. It's not enabled yet so we're safe-ish for now, but i can see this becoming irritating very fast.

[CPS2]

You can ban websites right? It could be possible to force people to type http://www.sho ryuken.com or something.

[error1]

something like tinyurl.com would be better, and should bypass refback I think

[Maj]

Well, it's not a problem yet and i don't want to enforce any automatic filters. Maybe they're just using it for internal tracking purposes. Anyway what can we do? Make all links plain text so they have to be copy/pasted? That's too much of a hassle.

[Xenozip.]

Youtube does this too, but it's a non-issue because forum links redirect to the SH main page rather than the forum.

[Buttermaker]

YouTube links directly to the forum thread: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1To3oO3g5s

Anyway what can we do?

If you don't want to automate it? Do it manually (http://anonym.to/?http://combovid.com), make the forum private or don't say things you wouldn't want the public to see.

As long as the forum is publicly accessible, anonymizing links doesn't guarantee that nobody finds the thread, of course.

[Maj]

Yup, and i haven't reached the point where i want to make it completely invisible, so this is just another in a long list of (potential) annoyances that i'll have to live with. My thing is, if we hide everything, then the random lurkers will think we've got something to hide.

At least the way things are, they can read enough to lose interest on their own. Because let's face it, none of this is terribly exciting for people who aren't combo makers. Everyone else only cares about the five-minute-long finished product, not the volumes of text leading up to it.

[Xenozip.]

YouTube links directly to the forum thread: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1To3oO3g5s

Huh, that's new to me. Whenever I click the SH links on my vids it goes to the main rather than the thread.

But you're right, that one does.

[Doopliss]

Uhm, Maj, somehow the cookies to this site got saved in my MvC3 music folder, how can this be? XD

Or maybe it wasn't cookies, they were called: "aehgew", and I got some .gifs that were icons in the forums, and links to some cached page.

[Maj]

No clue what that's about. I just work here.

[Doopliss]

Well, It's good that I found it, because I was about to put that folder up for download XD

[Maj]

Most users ever online was 36 on Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:27 am

Wtf happened on Monday?

[Rufus]

Most users ever online was 36 on Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:27 am

Wtf happened on Monday?

Sunday after New Year's -- we were all bored?

[Buttermaker]

General -> Post settings -> Posts per page: 40

[Maj]

Why 40?

[Buttermaker]

Or 50, if that sounds better. 15 just isn't enough. It leads to a lot of going back to the previous page to check if it has new posts as well.

[Maj]

You're right, 15 is probably too little. I'll double it to 30 for starters, and we'll see if it has any impact on server load and go from there. Any objections?

Although having to go back to the previous page is just a matter of luck. It'll happen half as often now, but even with 50 posts per page, the likelyhood would still be in the same order of magnitude.

[Doopliss]

Nice, however, you should make it so that you can look at new posts, and if the thread reached a new page, you will still be directed to the new posts on the previous page.

[Maj]

Um, i don't think that's an option i can enable, is it? Hopefully it'll get added to the phpBB software in the future, but i have no idea what their priorities are. I'm surprised they don't give users the option to select how many posts are displayed on each page, but maybe it's a server load concern. But then again, why don't they give users individual control and allow the admin to set the maximum?

[Doopliss]

Heh, I have no idea how this works, I just assumed you could do that.

[Buttermaker]

I thought if this feature existed, I would've seen it, so I didn't google it until now.

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... #p12837490